For those of you who play World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King, you might have noticed that trash mobs aren’t as mindless and boring as they used to be. Yes folks, gone are the days of trash pulls that required no thought. It has become standard these days for tanks to just round everything up and let dps just AoE everything down. But Blizzard has taken a step in the right direction and implemented a creative way to make every Icecrown Citadel (ICC) raid unique.
The Lower Spire (First wing of ICC) has very unique trash mobs. Most of the mobs are made up of undead melee attackers that do a significant amount of AoE damage when killed. This discourages people from AoEing a large group of them down and also forces healers to pay more attention. There are also sets of spiders that web wrap random people and a skeleton mage that must be facing away from the raid since they shoot down a path of ice that does a lot of damage.
Now my personal favorite mob in Lower Spire is the big skeleton statues that are on the sides of the room. These guys can only be activated if someone steps on an alarm. The alarm is invisible and can only be seen by rogues (they need to be really close to it to see it). The alarm is put in random locations so it is always a new experience every time you do ICC. The mob itself cleaves hard and has an AoE silence so healers and dps need to watch for it. I absolutely love this mob because you could be fighting a whole pack of trash mobs and someone can trigger an alarm (or two) making the encounter much more difficult, fun and interesting.
Now for the new wing: Plagueworks. I haven’t spent a lot of time in there, but like the Lower Spire wing it seemed to have unique mobs and traps set up.
As soon as you enter you will notice blue gas/steam coming out from the sides of the room. You need to move in between them because the gas will kill you. I know from firsthand experience..that gas hurts…..a lot.
I have only encountered the flying Val’kyr Herald in Plagueworks. She spawns essences that take on the form of a random raid member. The essence will use abilities that a normal player will use so if a healer is “copied” that essence will start healing. She seems to spawn these essences very frequently so pulling two Val’kyr Herald at once is a pain.
Giving trash encounters that element of surprise, that feeling of uncertainty is a refreshing break from what trash mobs in Ulduar, Trial of the Champions (free loot, no trash!), etc previously offered. Hopefully this trend will continue as the other wings of ICC open up giving us the biggest and most epic raid ever.
I am VERY VERY glad they are finally adding this to Instances. This is what instances have really needed for the longest time. I personally think instances should be designed with a set number of random variables, perhaps even different maps. I
firmly believe it adds to the re-playability of the instance if every time you are running it you get something new.
I would even go further to say that the bosses should be in different rooms each time and what not. I believe it would really add to the feel of the instance.
From my experience ICC is the only raid that has this kind of “uncertainty” factor which makes the replay value very high. I mean take a look at ToC. It was literally go in and farm the bosses for 45 minutes or an hour. No trash whatsoever it was a snooze fest.
But as I mentioned in the post I am very excited and happy with the trash leading to raid bosses in ICC. I didn’t get a chance to write about Stinky and Precious in my original post (didn’t actually encounter them at the time it was written) but wow……I hope they put more of these mini type bosses in the other wings too.